Alec Guinness as Agatha d'Ascoyne in Kind Hearts and Coronets: 'arguably one of the two most perfect British movies ever made'.
Photograph: Allstar Collection/Cinetext/EALI/Sportsphoto Ltd./Allstar

Arguably the two most perfect British movies were made in the same year, 1949 – Carol Reed's The Third Man and Robert Hamer's Kind Hearts and Coronets. In Hamer's movie, Dennis Price, the gay, Oxford-educated son of a brigadier-general, gives his greatest performance as the aggrieved Edwardian shop assistant revenging himself on the establishment for his mother's humiliation, and he's certainly not overshadowed by Alec Guinness's protean virtuosity.

His sequence with Guinness as his senile, snobbish clerical victim is exquisitely funny and most beautifully lit by Douglas Slocombe. Equally good are Valerie Hobson and Joan Greenwood as the two women waiting for Price when he's released from the condemned cell.

Hamer had a particular liking for the late-Victorian/Edwardian world and was a great Francophile. Both passions are reflected by two classic black comedies that influenced the film: Lord Arthur Savile's Crime, which Oscar Wilde wrote just after reading Crime and Punishment, and Sacha Guitry's 1936 movie, Le roman d'un tricheur, an ironic movie with a voiceover but no dialogue, in which the narrator traces his relentless social advancement by way of criminal acts.

It's great to have Kind Hearts and Coronets back on the big screen, and it's now available with interesting extras on DVD and Blu-ray from Optimum Releasing.